Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
establishing the causal effects of our pursuits for the foreseeable future.
Indeed,thereisnoguaranteethatwewilleverbeinapositiontoidentify
with con
dence the mechanisms by which anthropogenic stresses cause
ecological degradation, and thereby to found decisions on reasonable
levels of con
dence that we know what the likely outcomes of an action
or combinations of actions will be.
Although we do not know how the disturbance of ecosystems causes
their health to deteriorate, we are aware that their degradation is happen-
ing at an increasingly rapid rate and that, in all likelihood, this is due to
human interference with natural processes.
8
Accordingly, we must
nd a
means of deciding how to control our activities with a view to maintain-
ing systemic properties despite our ignorance of how they cause ecosys-
tems to decline and fail. It is argued in
Section 3.2
that this situation
demands a new conception of the precautionary principle which is attuned
to endemic uncertainty. The reconceived principle would require that
positive action should be taken as a matter of course to reduce risks of
ecological harm, and thereby to address sources of threat to society
s
well-being. Normative precaution could be put into practice under a legal
regime which requires that characteristics of importance for ecosystem
functionality should, as far as possible, be preserved, and that options for
meeting policy objectives should be evaluated by reference to their pro-
pensity to impinge on these characteristics. An introduction to this legal
framework is provided at
Section 3.1.2
.
Resilience should provide a focal point for ecological protection because
it is this property that enables ecosystems to maintain their functionality in
the face of external challenges. The guiding principle for decision-making
should therefore be the avoidance or reduction of reliance on activities
that may erode resilience. However, a dif
'
culty with adopting this concept
as an object of legal protection is that resilience is not amenable to use as
a quantitative benchmark by which we can determine how much human
interference an ecosystem can accommodate. This is because the adequacy
of an ecosystem
'
s resilience is relative to the scale of challenges that it may
meet.
9
This dif
culty is also compounded by our currently poor under-
standing of where resilience lies in ecosystems and of how it is lost.
Regulatory approaches which assume that the acceptability or unac-
ceptability of proposals can be judged by reference to the anthropogenic
stresses that the environment can carry are not suitable for ecological
8
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment,
'
Ecosystems and Human Well-Being
'
.
9
Chapter 2, Section 2.3.
